BlazeVOX books

New City by Scott Abels

The headnote to William Rankine's Radical Cartography website comes from Jean Baudrillard. “It is the real, and not the map, whose vestiges subsist here and there, in the deserts which are no longer those of the Empire but our own: The desert of the real itself.” Scott Abels inhabits vestiges that include Mexico, Hawai`i, and Nebraska. Their landscapes are very different, but Abels is more interested in their parallel dysfunctions. The boys who lose arms on Mexican trains join missing hands with the unemployed in the American Midwest. “We can depend upon the land. / But we cannot depend on jobs.” He codes his family history with symptoms (e.g., Rx = prescription drugs; SRP = Strong Religious Preference). Not that everything is hopeless, as Abels remarks with a wryness worthy of strong whiskey: “Happy journey, / Everybody. / We had medical care, / and Coca-Cola / has reached us here.” This is global capital's family tree, whose diagnosis is dire. But Abels's prescription makes the desert of the real a carnival. It's a “Dick Cheney Parade,” and Christopher Columbus shits bricks. Given an oil spill or other disaster, “Whoever owns it / is lord of all he wants.”

—Susan M. Schultz, author of Dementia Blog, volumes 1 and 2

Roll into Scott Abels’s gloriously fracked New City, where the vibe is fun, loving, creating, jobs, for kids, “looping our rope over / a natural crotch,” growing up, in Nebraska, looking like clip art, don’t worry pee is sterile, we’re singing for whose supper?, this city’s, got us, altogether now—if you're a red-blooded a merry can of worms, you need to read this.

—Catherine Wagner, author of Nervous Device and My New Job

Scott Abels is also the author of Rambo Goes to Idaho (BlazeVOX, 2011), as well as the chapbook A STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH (Beard of Bees Press, 2015). He has an MFA in Creative Writing from Boise State University. After many years living and teaching in Mexico and Hawai'i, he now lives on the family homestead near Stanton, Nebraska, where he edits the online poetry journal Country Music.